Determining a size and demographics of a television viewing audience helps television program producers improve their television programming and determine a price to be charged for advertising that is broadcasted during such programming. In addition, accurate television viewing demographics allow advertisers to target audiences of a desired size and/or audiences comprising members having a set of common, desired characteristics (e.g., income level, lifestyles, interests, etc.).
In order to collect these demographics, an audience measurement company may enlist a number of television viewers (e.g., panelists) to cooperate in an audience measurement study for a predefined length of time. The viewing habits of these enlisted viewers, as well as demographic data about these enlisted viewers, are collected using automated and/or manual collection methods. The collected data is subsequently used to generate a variety of informational statistics related to television viewing audiences including, for example, audience sizes, audience demographics, audience preferences, the total number of hours of television viewing per household and/or per region, etc.
The configurations of audience measurement systems vary depending on the equipment used to receive, process, and display television signals in each home being monitored. For example, homes that receive cable television signals and/or satellite television signals typically include a set top box (STB) to receive television signals from a cable and/or a satellite television provider. Television systems configured in this manner are typically monitored using hardware, firmware, and/or software to interface with the STB to extract or to generate signal information therefrom. Such hardware, firmware, and/or software may be adapted to perform a variety of monitoring tasks including, for example, detecting the channel tuning status of a tuning device disposed in the STB, extracting program identification codes embedded in television signals tuned by the STB, generating signatures characteristic of television signals tuned by the STB, etc. The collected viewing and demographic data may then be transmitted to a data collection facility for processing.
Traditional audience measurement systems have employed a client/server architecture with the client (e.g., a metering device, measurement device, etc.) and server (e.g., a data collection unit to collect data from the metering device) being in fixed physical locations. For example, in a typical system, the client is located in a room in an enlisted viewer's residence and there may be a need for multiple clients if additional rooms in the enlisted viewer's residence are to be monitored. The server is typically located in an off-site location away from the enlisted viewer's residence. Also, each client is assigned to a specific data collection server so that, even in the case of a portable client (e.g., a metering device), data collected by the metering device is always exported to the same data collection server.
Typically, metering devices (e.g., a Peoplemeter) communicate with media devices (e.g., devices to be measured such as a TV, STB, etc.) to measure usage of the media devices. The metering devices accumulate the viewing and demographic data and typically use a proprietary data transfer protocol to communicate with a dedicated data collection unit. The proprietary data transfer protocol is non-extensible.